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		<title>I give up on the gift card plan. &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/04-April/08.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>I give up on the gift card plan.</h1>
			<p>Day 00763: Saturday, 2017 April 08</p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;d planned to try to claim more gift cards, for a total of at least ten; one for each day of the giveaway.
		However, I&apos;m not up to the task.
		The day before yesterday, I rode to the general area to buy potatoes.
		Then yesterday, I rode just a bit further to reach the temporary car dealership.
		That was enough to take a lot out of me.
		I can&apos;t do this nine more days in a row.
		I mean, I <strong>*could*</strong>, but I&apos;d run myself ragged and there&apos;s a possibility I&apos;d fall behind in my studies.
		It&apos;s just not worth it.
		I&apos;m not in that bad of shape financially to need the extra forty-five dollars at the cost of my energy and grades.
		That first time, going yesterday, was still totally worth it.
		I got to see how they ran the giveaway.
		It was a lot less formal than I feared.
		I met that fool that thought they actually won something big.
		And most of all, I got to straight-up tell the salesperson I knew I&apos;d won the consolation prize from the get-go.
		But that&apos;s got to be the end of it.
		I need to get back to my studies.
	</p>
	<p>
		At work, I finally worked out one last kink in the base Minetest mod I&apos;m working on, the one that compresses rare nodes both for storage and for use in expensive craft recipes.
		For the most part, everything&apos;s been programmed, aside from the compressed versions of a few simple nodes that will just have some colour channels inverted and the compressed waterlily node.
		I simply haven&apos;t been able to figure out what to do with the waterlilies.
		Should I make them into a full, solid node?
		The only way I see to do that would either be to use a waterlily image for each face, which would look stupid, or find some way to create a side image for a stack of them.
		Either option didn&apos;t look good.
		Should I leave them as a flat, intangible node?
		The obvious texture for that would be an overlap of normal waterlilies, but I only have two pixels free to display the overlap.
		It&apos;d barely show, and most people would either not even notice or wouldn&apos;t be able to tell why the waterlily looked strange on one side.
		I&apos;ve figured it out now though.
		I&apos;ll keep the node flat and intangible, but shrink the waterlilies and place them side by side.
		The waterlilies in Minetest are about a meter across.
		They&apos;re beautiful, but not realistic.
		My version will be a cluster of nine of them, each about five sixteenths of a meter across.
		Do we need a more realistic version of the waterlily?
		No.
		But I need a compressed version to complete my mod, and this more-realistic version provides a nice way to do that.
		There&apos;ll be slight space throughout the waterlilies, as each lily will be five pixels across and the full texture will be sixteen pixels across.
		The lilies will also face different directions.
		At first, I was going to run a pseudorandomiser once to decide the placement of everything, but before I got home, I came up with a far better idea.
		I&apos;ll build the randomisation into the mod!
		The mod&apos;ll choose the placements and orientations each time the server starts, so it&apos;ll change every time.
		There&apos;s no more real planning to do for this mod now, gust some programming and colour-choosing.
		I&apos;ll wait to release it once finished though.
		I want a second mod released at the same time, one that&apos;ll show why the dense nodes are even needed.
		I&apos;ll wait until the diamese mod is complete to release them both.
	</p>
	<p>
		I had a strange not-quite-customer come through the drive-through today.
		They stopped at the menu board, ordered, then when asked to pay at the window, instead drove away without paying and without getting their requested food.
		Strange.
		I wonder what that was about.
		Maybe they forgot their wallet?
	</p>
	<p>
		Apparently, one of the shift leaders has been trying to get me a hat.
		I&apos;m not sure who they&apos;ve been pestering, probably the head manager or the former assistant manager that now runs all our franchise&apos;s stores from higher up, but they&apos;ve been pestering them repeatedly.
		I was told I could do that, but it was never worth it.
		If I have to ask repeatedly for something, I&apos;ll instead find my own workaround, which in my case, meant hair clips to keep my hair from hitting me in the eyes.
		I&apos;m thankful for the new hat though.
		I think the hair clips suit me better, but I often work the drive-through window.
		We have this headset, and I frequently need to adjust it.
		Most of the time, I need it to cover my ear, but sometimes a soft-spoken customer will be talking to me at the window, and I&apos;ll need to move the headset away from my ear to hear them.
		It doesn&apos;t matter that my uncovered ear is the one pointed at the window; without both ears, it&apos;s difficult to hear many people.
		All that adjustment messes with my hair clips and messes up my hair.
		With this hat, I no longer have to deal with that.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I finished up my reading assignment, and with it, the bulk of my essay for the week.
		The essay still remains without a title though, so I&apos;m not able to upload even this incomplete version yet.
		I wrote up my <a href="/en/coursework/HIST1421/#Unit1">learning journal entry</a> as well, which is kind of short.
		In my defence, it&apos;s supposed to be about the fall of &quot;democracy&quot; in Greece, but that was barely touched upon in the reading assignment.
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			The first definition of &quot;demos&quot; mentioned in the reading assignment was used to refer to subdivisions of land.
			These subdivisions were controlled by the ten tribes formed by Cleisthenes when Cleisthenes broke up the three factions left in the wake of Solon&apos;s reform.
		</p>
		<p>
			The second use of the word &quot;demos&quot; in the reading material&apos;s a bit unclear.
			I&apos;m not sure if it means &quot;people&quot; or &quot;free, native-born males&quot;.
		</p>
		<p>
			The third meaning of the word &quot;demos&quot; presented in the text is &quot;mob&quot;.
			In a way, this definition is very much like the one in the last paragraph.
			People have a mob mentality often times, and form a counterproductive mob.
			People frequently fail to think and act logically, so the mob definition is mostly just a negative spin on the people definition.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
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